GRANT KITTRELL

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Grant Kittrell is a writer, illustrator, and the Poetry Editor at Flock Literary Journal, which recently received CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Best Debut Magazine. He was the winner of the 2018 Phillip Booth Poetry Prize. Last year he served as the Fall 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College. His work has appeared in Salt Hill, The Common, The Carolina Quarterly, The Normal School, Gigantic Sequins, Construction and Magma Poetry, among others. His collection of prose poems, Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out, is out from Groundhog Poetry Press. He received his MFA from Hollins University in 2014, and he currently lives and writes in Lynchburg, VA where he serves as the Director of the Academic Services Center and the Writing Program at Randolph College.

Steeped in images from the known world in a series of topographical maps of the subconscious, populated by domestic tableaus in the tradition of Russell Edson and James Tate, and infused with a hint of Southern Gothic, Grant Kittrell’s Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out contains prose poems that manifest the ill-logic of our dreams: imaginative word-scapes that render the real world, transmuted by the twin-engines of humor and sadness.

–Christopher Kennedy, author of Ennui Prophet

The lucid cautionary tales in Grant Kittrell’s Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out, riff on prose, but the music in these poems is lithely juke-joint and rife with wisdoms that expose the dark underbelly of life—Also, the dualities. With every beautiful and parallel muscle of the senses, Kittrell’s trajectory works a magic of pathos and ethos, “I got a buttercup in the back seat that needs your nose to see itself.” These tenderly whimsical and sad poems sometimes speak to us through squirrels and trees, “marvel at the transactions of two such different spirits” working as vessels to transcend for us the distances between the physical and spiritual realms, the pitfalls and icebergs of our relationships—A poet’s language that so soulfully speaks to matters of the human heart—-“with eyes shaped like our next grief.” Kittrell’s lush and keen-eyed collection celebrates the peculiar and extraordinary ways we exist and offers, by turns, an eclectic blueprint to steer us into deeper waters, connecting us to the sobering homelands of the body, heart and soul.